Welcome To Our Life These Days
Above pics: Our cooking set up in the van; new property on the market we looked at on June 1st
Two days ago (June 1st), I was in the prep stage of making dinner in the van when Mike called out from behind his pocket computer (aka smartphone): “There’s a new property on the market. It’s an hour old.” He then told me that the website he was on informed him that 65 people had already viewed the land and 5 people clicked the save feature. Okay, I thought, here we go!
The price point of said new listing was low enough to inspire me to blurt out my first question: “What’s wrong with it? We texted our realtor the listing straightaway and asked him to please send us more info. By the time I had water starting to boil on the campstove, we had the directions and Mike had located the property on his onX app. Since we’ve learned in the field that we need to act quickly on these things, I decided to cancel the plans I had in town. We scarfed down dinner and headed out. Welcome to our life these days!
It’s a certain flavor of madness to live this way, friends. But part of the reason we decided to sell our house last October was so we could liquidate our assets and be able to act more quickly on a land purchase, in short because, well, we need to. There’s a whole lotta competition out there these days. So here we are, living the #vanlife and doing our land search thing.
After a walkabout on the property for sale, which was situated a short drive east from where we were parked in the woods around Missoula, we headed back to the van. (And now you may be thinking, Wait, aren’t they living in the van? How did they get to the land and then drive BACK to the van? This is how: We recently fetched back our Subaru from our son who had borrowed it for the winter months while we were on retreat at Deer Park. So this is us now with 2 vehicles. One we call home and one to cruise around in that’s way better on gas.) On the way back to the woods, we chatted about how deceptively un-simple this whole matter of buying land is. How amazing it is that each property we see comes equipped with its own unique list of pros & cons.
And yesterday morning over coffee, we pondered once again about how in the world we’re supposed to make such a decision as this. Do we make an offer or do we wait for something better to come along? Hoping that it DOES come along. No doubt concessions have to be made in regards to what we’d ideally like to have on the land we buy, but how does one know which concessions to make and how many concessions is too many concessions? When do we hit the threshold where we’re comprising our vision for the frantic motivation of wanting/needing to buy something - anything! - we possibly can? This is some of what’s going on for us right now.
It all may be moot anyway. This property may already be under contract. The price was low enough where there’s little chance of it lasting very long. We took another look at it yesterday. Mike keenly observed that both of us are thinking with our intellect while feeling with our gut on this one. Neither of us feels like it’s a good fit. Yet the price is so low that we think we should just do it and make it work. Gosh this is hard stuff.
This property brings our total to 15 that we’ve seen boots-on-the-ground since early April. Sheesh. I don’t know guys. I really don’t. As of 7:40am yesterday, this property had been viewed 286 times with a total of 24 saves. It ticks off some of the A’s (see previous blog post if you’re not sure what the heck I’m talking about) but ultimately it’s not the right piece of ground. It would be more of a stepping stone piece of land. An investment property that we could maybe improve on and then resell. But that’s not what we’re looking to do. Sheesh. Did I say that already? Whelp, it’s worth repeating. And ending on. Sheesh!